Don't comment on the story, just talk about the Chinese and Indian elements in this movie that impressed me a lot.
May involve spoilers.
I only watched two movies this Spring Festival.
It happens that both of them involve China and India, which is obvious from the name, one is "Kung Fu Yoga", and the other is "Havoc in Tianzhu".
It is also because of this that the two films were criticized as "theme" before.
In fact, I don't think there is anything to collide with. In a large range, it belongs to the New Year's comedy. However, if you look closely, "Kung Fu Yoga" is a co-production action scene, and "Havoc in Tianzhu" is a road trip to Tianzhu.
This difference can be seen from the different emphases of the two on the ancient civilization of India.
The India in "Havoc in Tianzhu" is the India in the eyes of tourists who participated in the "N-day overseas tour". Celebrating, noisy, with big-breasted beauties, crooked alleys, and crowded buses, it is very urban and exotic, and even arranged a "Holi Festival" that looks like a color run, for fear that the picture will not be rich in color.
This is very much in line with the general public's established impression of the country.
"Kung Fu Yoga" shows a more modern and higher level of India.
This presentation is first accomplished through the appearance of characters.
The beautiful and sassy Indian sisters have a figure, culture, English and Chinese, yoga, breath-holding and fist-fighting. They can swim in glaciers and ride motorcycles on the streets of Dubai. Even if they are chased by bad guys, they will scream. But overall it's so cool and beautiful that I have no friends.
It's not like the Indian women who are "oppressed" and "violated" in the news at all times.
The villain's eldest brother is also very handsome, with deep eyes, playing eagles, believing in modern high technology, and has several multinational teams under his hands, and it is completely unclear which country is fighting.
Even the female professor who pretended to be the princess was elegant and calm. She also studied Chinese with foreign students from Beijing, and gave lectures in traditional clothes in ancient buildings.
In general, this is India that domestic audiences are not very familiar with, and may even consider a bit "fake".
Yet it is precisely the truest.
Like any modern country with rapid development, India also presents a huge gap between rich and poor and hierarchical divisions. In other words, the wealthy, literate, and high-tech people shown in "Kung Fu Yoga", and the group of people depicted in "Havoc in Heaven" who can only work on the roof of a dilapidated bus, also The group of people who performed "magic tricks" at the fairs that were filmed in both films lived in the same country and the same era.
The upper class has spare time and money, cares about treasures and cares about history, and the life of the lower class can only become the embellishment of the scene - this is the reality.
In addition, the traditional caste system (Caste System) has exacerbated this point. The "Gitanjali" family of the princesses and the "Aroshuna" family of the villain's eldest brother are not just because they are cool. Repeated over and over again.
As a social system that once existed in India and other South Asian regions, the caste system in the post-colonial era emphasized occupational level, origin, and family honor and disgrace (the literature I read mentioned that it will be roughly divided into five levels, the lowest one Classes are called "untouchables"), even though they were legally abolished after the founding of India, they are still valued and acquiesced in today's society.
The villain's eldest brother worked so hard to find ancestral relics, in addition to wanting to get the treasure, he also wanted to "recover the family", which is a reflection of the influence of the caste system in modern times.
After talking about the India itself presented in the film, I would like to talk about the cultural fusion elements contained in it.
In this regard, "Kung Fu Yoga" is very successful, neither humble nor arrogant, very attractive.
The main characters who appeared first, except for the villain's eldest brother, were almost all bilingual learners of Chinese and English - although the two sisters Hua's Chinese dubbing accent was a bit strong. No matter fighting drama or literary drama, there is a mixture of Chinese and English from time to time, and code-switching is flying up, which is also very suitable for young people in reality.
The second is the detailed setting of the characters. Jackie Chan played an archaeologist who knew more about Indian traditional culture than Indians. Not only was he familiar with history, but he also played with ancient Indian Buddhism, twenty-eight constellations, and ancient buildings. He and Princess Ahimita looked at the map and analyzed the scene from the ancient book. It sounds ridiculous, but it is logically clear and has a broad range of knowledge.
Speaking of which, there is one scene that I remember clearly.
Before they fell into the underground palace, Jackie Chan jumped on the slate and asked the villain, the twenty-eight constellations of ancient India, which one are you? (Probably such a line?)
The villain's eldest brother said with a dazed face, Aries.
As a result, in the movie theater, I was the only one who saw this and laughed...
The little assistant played by Muqi Miya also has a tricky setting - she can do yoga. When trapped under the ice, she and her Indian sister used yoga to untie themselves. The soft posture is exactly the representative of men and women practicing yoga in China and the world.
In the same way, in the end of the underground palace, the decent boss and the villain boss fight, isn't the villain's big brother's fists and kicks also kung fu? It’s just that it’s not necessarily orthodox Chinese Kung Fu, it’s Indian Kung Fu.
This kind of cultural fusion of "you have me and I have you" is the height of co-production, and it is also a reflection of today's multicultural world.
They are natural, not rigid, and you don't even realize that these things have different cultural origins.
Just like in Dubai, Teacher Zhang Guoli was wearing a headscarf to race camels with the prince, and there was not much sense of disobedience - a local Chinese tyrant in Dubai, isn't this a very common setting?
It is also worth mentioning that the collision and dispute between tradition and modernity shot in the film.
This is a proposition that does not distinguish between China and India. It was not deliberately set off, nor was it praised or criticized for any party, but it was clearly shown.
At the beginning of the movie, Professor Jack uses the most advanced machine to demonstrate the color identification of ancient cultural relics (oh, this technology can be completely developed if it is really good), to explore the glaciers, first use drones, and call friends to drill holes for oil drilling. New machines...all sorts of things, all benefiting from modern technology.
The villain's eldest brother is also advanced, bringing a large number of off-road vehicles and men who look like multinational mercenaries to rob. But the villain's eldest brother is more extreme, and his lines are always "I don't believe in any traditions, modern technology is the king, Barabara", a typical example of eliminating superstition and not caring about the past.
He also said, "Buddhism has been introduced to China for thousands of years, but it is no longer popular in India today."
In the end, it's not up to Professor Jack to find the treasure, cut.
Li Zhiting represents another type. Make some cool gadgets by yourself, live a happy and unrestrained life, rob the tomb and not hand it over to the state, but turn it into the market in your own hands, a smart and clever ghost.
He was a good person when he was in the group, but he was always a little careful. From the beginning to the end, the characters did not collapse, and he never showed any lofty consciousness of "protecting cultural relics". In the whole movie, there is only Xiaoguang's sentence "This is wrong".
He is a high-quality young man who makes jokes in modern society. He is agile and smart, knows the value of ancient things, and can fight villains at critical moments. They are not so noble, but they have their own way of dealing with them. If they are not persuaded, they only cooperate with each other, and no one can change them.
When these various characters finally entered the underground palace, they all entered the eyes of the Buddha statue.
The box of scriptures that the Buddha statue silently guards is the final proposition that the film wants to express.
"Preserving knowledge, experience, literature to create a better world for future generations"
——This line and chicken soup are really old-fashioned, not new at all, and it is almost embarrassing to read out of the princess' mouth.
But I always think of Zhao Xingde in Dunhuang. An unknown little person in the dust of history, during the war, he participated in the operation of storing tens of millions of bundles of scriptures in the Dunhuang Grottoes, and wrote "Fulong to the eight parts of the dragon and the sky, the long is the guardian, the city god is peaceful, and the people are peaceful". Inoue Yasushi wrote his own "will to escape from the world" as this little man, and Zhao Xingde, who was willing to "give up", did not know what a profound impact he had done on historical inheritance and the development of human civilization.
But before this time, in the same period of the ancient Tang Dynasty, in the distant Tianzhu, Buddhism was at its peak, and Xuanzang did not hesitate to travel thousands of miles to obtain scriptures. A certain noble family who may have a whim, chooses different types of scriptures to pack, repairs the underground palace under the small temple, and uses gold to make the Buddha statue in the treasure hall. The Buddha is solemn and kind, silently guarding these scriptures.
A guard is a thousand years.
——Isn't it fantastic? Is it nonsense? Is it funny?
But if you go to Dunhuang Yungang, Borobudur Prambanan, Angkor Wat Golden Temple, to see these buildings that cannot be copied, to imagine that thousands of years ago someone carved beams and painted walls, painted Buddha statues, and put scriptures Calligraphy and painting are stored in it...isn't it more fantastic?
The rivers of civilization are fed by many tiny trickles, and religion is a part of it. It is because of these trickles that we are able to know how smart our ancestors were, how much effort and effort they put in, how they lived their lives earnestly and with hope, and how we became who we are today.
This is the simplest core of Kung Fu Yoga.
I remembered something completely opposite to the New Year's comedy, but related to the relics of civilization.
ISIS is on Syrian soil, blowing up the Temple of Barshamin, burning the ancient manuscripts of the library in Mosul, blowing up the Roman Theater of Palmyra, blowing up the Monastery of St. Elijah, the 82-year-old Syrian archaeology master Possibly transferred a large number of artifacts, tortured and beheaded by ISIS.
The things that the movie emphasizes, the things that are said seriously as lines, may be regarded as embarrassing preaching.
But in reality, there are many cruel situations where you can't even preach, and it just didn't happen in front of your eyes.
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